Course Delivery

Assessment

Assessment Type

Assessment length / details

Proportion

Semester Exam

2 Hours
Semester Exam

50%

Semester Assessment

1 x 2500 word essay

50%

Supplementary Assessment

Resubmit failed or missing 2500 word essay
Students who fail the module will be required to make good any missing assessment elements and / or resubmit any failed coursework assignments (writing on a fresh topic), and/or sit the supplementary examinatiion paper.

50%

Supplementary Exam

2 Hours
Resit failed or missed exam

50%

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this module students should be able to:

1. Demostrate an understanding of the distinctive thematic concerns and formal innovations that characterise late-twentieth-century texts.

2. Locate and discuss late-twentieth-century texts in terms of their historical, social, and cultural contexts.

3. Display awareness of some of the key features of postmodernism as manifested in literary texts.

4. Examine the ways in which late-twentieth century literature engages with issues of class, gender, race, and/or nationality.

5. Write about literary texts from a range of genres in a critically-focused and well-structured manner.

Aims

To introduce students to a range of literary texts from the post-war period, and in a variety of genres.

To enable students to locate and discuss post-war literary texts in their historical, social, and political contexts.

To encourage students to explore the distinctive formal or generic features of post-war literature.

To enhance students' understanding of issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality as they inform late twentieth-century literature.

Brief description

This module introduces students to the distinctive features of post-war literature through detailed engagements with texts in a range of genres: drama, poetry, and the novel. The focus is upon writers and texts from Britain and Ireland, though the concerns of several of these texts with cultural hybridity and post-colonial identities will form the basis of discuss. Thematic lectures on ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, ‘Post-war poetry’, and ‘Postmodern fictions’ will offer historical, literary-historical, social, and political contextualisation, as well as explaining key critical terms and concepts. At the core of the module, however, are detailed engagements with a small number of carefully-chosen texts, which will be interpreted from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. Students will be encouraged to relate post-war literary texts to a wider ‘postmodern condition’ from which they arise; to think critically about the ways in which issues of class, gender, or racial difference inform late-twentieth-century texts; and to explore the formal or generic features that are distinctive of literature in this period.

Module Skills

Written: By developing a sustained critical argument.
Oral: Through class discussion, small group exercises, and seminar presentations. [Not assessed)

Improving own Learning and Performance

Through independent research and reading.

Information Technology

By using word-processing packages; using AberLearn Blackboard and other e-resources to research and access course documents and other materials; by submitting assignments via Turnitin.

Personal Development and Career planning

Through increased critical self-reflection and the development of transferable, ICT, communication and research skills

Problem solving

By evaluative analysis and the use of critical skills.

Research skills

By directed and independent research; by synthesizing information in an evaluative critical argument.

Subject Specific Skills

Through the reading, writing and researching skills involved in the interrogation of literary texts, and the conceptual/theoretical analysis of works of imaginative literature in relation to a range of other non-literary texts

Team work

Through group work in seminars; and through preparation for paired presentations in seminars.